Before the Fall(59)
*
Scott eats cereal for dinner, still dressed in his borrowed suit, tie askew. It feels disrespectful to take it off somehow. Death, so permanent for the dead, should be more than just an afternoon activity for the mourners. So he sits and shovels and chews in all black, like a breakfast undertaker.
He is standing at the sink, washing his single dish and spoon, when he hears the front door open. He knows without looking that it’s Layla, the sound of her heels and the smell of perfume.
“Are you decent?” she says, coming into the kitchen.
He lays his bowl on the dish rack to drain.
“I’m trying to figure out why you need place settings for thirty,” he says. “Cowboys used to travel the country with a single plate and fork and spoon.”
“Is that what you are?” she asks. “A cowboy?”
He goes to the living room and sits on the sofa. She pulls the blanket off the roll-top bar and pours herself a drink.
“Are you keeping the booze warm or—?”
“I’m an alcoholic,” he tells her. “I think.”
She sips her drink.
“You think.”
“Well, probably a safe bet, given that when I start drinking I can’t stop.”
“My father is the richest alcoholic on the planet. Forbes did an article, how he probably drinks three hundred thousand a year in top-shelf booze.”
“Maybe put that on his tombstone.”
She smiles, sits, her shoes dropping from her feet. She curls her right leg under her left.
“That’s Serge’s suit.”
He reaches for the tie.
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” she says. “It’s fine. He’s in Romania now, I think. On to his next epic f*ck.”
Scott watches her drink her scotch. Outside the rain smacks and streaks the windows.
“I ate a peach once,” he says, “in the Arizona desert, that was better than any sex I’ve ever had.”
“Careful,” she tells him. “I may take that as a challenge.”
After she’s gone he carries her glass to the sink. There is still a finger of scotch inside and before he pours it into the sink he holds it to his chin and smells, transported by that familiar earthy peat. The lives we live, he thinks, are filled with holes. He rinses the glass and lays it upside down to drain.
Scott goes into the bedroom and lies down on the bed, suit still on. He tries to imagine what it’s like to be dead, but can’t, and so he reaches over and turns off the light. The rain drums against the window glass. He stares at the ceiling, watching shadow streaks moving in reverse, raindrops slithering from down to up. Tree branches splayed in a Rorschach weave. The whiteness of the apartment is an empty canvas, a place waiting for its occupant to decide how to live.
What will he paint now? he wonders.
Chapter 21
Threads
There was an answer. They just didn’t have it yet. This was what Gus told his bosses when they pressed. It had been ten days since the crash. There was a hangar on a naval base out on Long Island where they collected the debris they’d recovered. A six-foot section of wing, a tray table, part of a leather headrest. It’s where the remaining bodies would be brought when they were recovered—assuming they were found with the wreckage and didn’t wash up on a beach like Emma Lightner or get pulled from a lobsterman’s net, like Sarah Kipling. Those bodies had been sent to local morgues and had to be recovered by federal mandate over a period of days. Jurisdiction was one of the many headaches you dealt with when investigating a crash into coastal waters.
Every day the divers put on wet suits, the pilots gassed their choppers, and captains divvied up the grid. Deep water is dark. Currents shift. What doesn’t float, sinks. Either way, the more time that went by, the less likely it was that they would find what they were looking for. Sometimes, when the waiting was too great, Gus would call in a chopper and fly out to the lead ship. He’d stand on the deck and help coordinate the search, watching the gulls circle. But even in the middle of the action Gus was still just standing around. He was an engineer, a specialist in airplane design who could find the flaw in any system. The caveat was he needed a system to analyze—propulsion, hydraulics, aerodynamics. All he had was a torn piece of wing, and the top-down pressure of a man being buried alive.
And yet even a small piece of wreckage tells a story. From the wing fragment they’d determined that the plane hit the water at a ninety-degree angle—diving straight down like a seabird. This is not a natural angle of descent for an airplane, which wants to glide on contoured wings. That suggested pilot error, even possibly a deliberate crash—although Gus reminded everyone of the possibility that the plane had actually descended at a more natural angle, only to impact a large wave head-on, simulating a nose-down crash. In other words, We don’t know anything for sure.
A few days later, a chunk of the tail section was spotted off Block Island. From this they got their first look at the hydraulic system—which appeared uncompromised. The next day two more pieces of luggage were found on a Montauk beach—one intact, the other split open, just a shell. And so it went, piece by piece, like searching a haystack for hay. The good news was that the wreckage seemed to be breaking up underwater, revealing itself a little at a time, but then, four days ago, the finds stopped coming. Now Gus is worried they might never find the bulk of the fuselage, that the remaining passengers and crew are gone for good.